Time to Get Social: What’s Good on Twitter

March 12th, 2014

For many folks, Twitter has replaced the newspaper – and why wouldn’t it? There are few other websites where you can see updates from your friends, family members, news agencies, and other parties of interest all in one convenient stream. Accordingly, a Twitter presence has become an essential part of most marketing plans.

This month we are going to take a look at how to use social media to market your mobile app. Up for this week: Twitter time.

From the mundane “Get Your Family to Download Your App” to the off the wall “Create Beer Coasters” join us on a 52-week journey of some of the top ways to promote and market your mobile application.

Week 10

Mobile Marketing Tips: Twitter Time

For many folks, Twitter has replaced the newspaper – and why wouldn’t it? There are few other websites where you can see updates from your friends, family members, news agencies, and other parties of interest all in one convenient stream. Accordingly, a Twitter presence has become an essential part of most marketing plans.

In truth, this is one of the most important advantages of using social media to broadcast your app - websites like Twitter are where your users tend to congregate and spend their time online, both for business and pleasure. If you can catch your customers while they’re reading content they enjoy or talking to their friends, they’re much more likely to view your product or company with a positive viewpoint.

Strategy

There are an endless number of guides, articles, blogs, and listicles that promise to massively increase your follower account and conversions. The effectiveness of their tactics are often questionable, and in some cases their advice may come at a significant cost to your app’s brand awareness and downloads. Accordingly, it’s best to stick to a few basic tactics when it comes to tweeting:

Create a personality – users are much more likely to remember your app/tweets if they associate it with something funny, awe-inspiring, emotionally engaging, or dynamic.

Don’t pitch your app too hard or too often – nobody wants to hear a sales proposal day-in, day-out, from the same company over and over. Some brands like to use a 3-to-1 ratio, where they post three “non-sales” tweets and one “call-to-action” tweet. Your app is not necessarily going to be friends with your customers, but you want to make them feel as if the app (or the person behind the app) understands them and knows what’s going on in pop culture, business, and the world at large.

The ultimate goal is to make an impression, not a sale – not all of your customers are going to respond to your calls to action. In truth, many of them will probably just scroll on by your tweets to read the latest celebrity gossip or sports scores. The key thing to remember is that every tweet is one more chance to catch their eye and get them to listen to what makes your app useful to them.

All above all other things, provide value, provide value, provide value. Twitter is a very valuable platform for marketing your product, but it’s not the end-all be-all of social media. Next week we’ll talk about the other platforms you can use to get the word out about your product. To learn more about Twitter and social media, Scott Levy wrote a great book called Tweet Naked that I’m currently reading. I suggest picking up a copy and following us on Twitterso that you can see when we update this post with things we learn from Scott.As always, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up.

Sam Allen

Samuel is something of a marketing Swiss Army knife. He enjoys helping clients build their web presence and visual identity through design, SEO, and good ol' fashioned content. A photographer by trade, he's had work published in the New York Times and the New Jersey Star-Ledger.